This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.

In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Austin’s explicit performatives (e.g., “promise,” “bequeath”) in terms of (i) the orders of regimentation between semantic-symbolic and pragmatic-indexical functions, (ii) the indexical anchoring of pragmatic effects within either denotationally mediated events-of-narration (En) or interactionally mediated events-of-signaling (Es), and (iii) the articulation of indexical function with speech participant roles. The article concludes with a reflection on how the architecture of the phonology-semantics interface (or duality of patterning) safeguards symbolism by impeding the processes of runaway semiotic naturalization that produce rigid performativity.

Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transportation that had until then been used almost exclusively in service of colonial resource extraction at the New Guinea gold fields. The mission prized movement and circulation as a Christian evangelistic practice in and of itself, in which the “message” and the process of its spread could be conflated. Yet this emphasis on circulation has been obscured by the almost exclusive attention within the anthropology of religion to evangelism as a form of agonistic comparison between Christianity and local culture and within linguistic anthropology to circulation as about type-token relations among texts.

Inhabitants of Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, routinely move between economic, social, and territorial systems that order community spheres, the Brazilian state apparatus, and global networks. Each of these comes encumbered with temporalities and spatialities that differentially parse space and time. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how chronotopes are made, and remade, in a place where community commitments are paramount. Through planning and calculation of urgency and priority, Gurupaenses make strategic choices to achieve calibration between Clockwork and community time. By waiting or leaving, hurrying or lingering, and by choosing the object, mode, and speed of motion, actors independently and communally “flex” time, constructing a Ragtime temporality in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed. In so doing, actors strategically navigate these theoretically incommensurable chronotopes, thus meeting immediate and long-term needs and attending to the social, economic, and political demands of both worlds.

This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.

In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the conaturalization of language and race is flexible and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate our projects at what has until now been a point of breakdown in raciolinguistic discussions by examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white settler colonial.

In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.

One of the key reasons that have been put forward for justifying the superior argumentative force of visuals over verbal arguments in advertising discourse is their immediacy. The immediate resonance of visuals and their forceful appeal bear considerable resemblance to the argumentative force of enthymemes as hidden premises in informal rhetorical argumentation. In this article an attempt is made at bridging the logical and pathemic appeals of enthymemes under the aegis of what may be called the pathology of the enthymeme, while demonstrating that what has been pejoratively tagged, since Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, as “the psychopathology of everyday life” in fact constitutes the very underpinning of enthymematic structures and a system of topoi of which such structures constitute an integral part. By assuming as the point of departure of this genealogico-pathological tracing Heidegger’s opening up of the meaning of logos and as destination Heidegger’s ontological reading of everydayness, the enthymematic embeddedness of cultural topoi is depathologized, while being reinserted in its “proper” pathological dimension. The exemplification of how visual enthymemes function and may be translated as hidden premises in advertising discourse seeks to demonstrate the pathology of the enthymeme as “unquestionable” major premises that underpin visual arguments.

What is the relation between wishes and witches, between Grice and Freud, between political repression and scientific rendering? What is the relation between ideational and affective phenomena (such as desire and jealousy) and material processes (such as particle scattering and diffusion barriers)? This article demonstrates the broad similarities underlying conversational implicature and dream interpretation, focusing on the use of communicative intentions and repressed wishes as grounds for motiving inferences. It describes a variety of other hermeneutics that evince a similar logic, albeit with different grounds—witch trials among the Azande, and taboo-reckoning among the Maya. And it details the intimate relation between such hermeneutics and the techniques scientists use to produce and interpret laboratory phenomena, and thereby render the real. It foregrounds the affective nature of such processes: the pleasures and pains of laboring in productively constrained, and phenomena-creating, inferential spaces.

This article explores the situated usage of recognitional deixis, a prominent feature of the religious register of the Catholic community of Mano, Guinea. Recognitional deixis is understood to be the marking of referents as known and recognizable by the interlocutors, typically belonging to their common ground. While deictic markers are known to reflect a specific speaker-hearer-object configuration, I suggest reversing the indexical relationship and claim that instead of indexing contextual relationships (context presupposition), deictic markers rather project them in a performative fashion (context creation). In the study in question dealing with the marking of common ground by recognitional deixis, what gets projected is a presupposition of shared knowledge. Because of the dialogic orientation of recognitional deixis, as a consequence of presupposition projection, the speaker and the addressees emerge as knowledge-sharing co-insiders. This, in turn, contributes to a performative creation of a community of co-insiders—a religious community sharing religious knowledge.

Classic Whorfian work has explored the relationship between grammatical features and cognition, but how languages can also influence thought through discursive patterns remains a largely unexplored topic in the neo-Whorfian agenda. In this article, I conduct an ethnopoetic analysis of a Chol traditional story to investigate the relationships between Chol “fashions of speaking,” in the Whorfian sense of the term, and cognitive patterns. I revisit a classic Whorfian topic—how speakers of different languages conceptualize time—but through close examination of how temporal relationships between events are deployed in narrative contexts. I argue that Chol narratives possess a nonlinear plot structure, which exemplifies the kind of non-iconic, nonlinear presentation of sequential events that is characteristic of Chol discourse and thought.

The article engages with the semiotics of “stylized faces” in online communication, focusing on “smileys.” It reconstructs the origins of both emoticons and emojis, outlining how they differ functionally (paralinguistic signs vs. narrative figures) and commenting on their pragmatics, with regard to the issue of literacy as related to generational fruition. A chronology is provided of the first tokens of smileys in written communication, both before and after the Internet. By relying upon the anthropology of the face dating back to prehistory, the issues of iconism and universality are discussed, supporting the view that there is a strong cultural, conventional component in face depiction, varying diachronically (emoticons versus emojis) and diatopically (emoticons versus kaomojis, i.e., Japanese emoticons). Emoticons and emojis are regarded as prominent examples of intermedia, working at the intersection of written word and image. Finally, stylized digital faces are set in the broader framework of Internet memes, thus discussing the dichotomy between structural memes (the focus is on the formula) and iconic memes (the focus is on the image and, thus, the face). Throughout the text, great care is devoted to the philology of sources, some of them being presented in this form for the first time.

Mainland Japanese middle-school teachers working on Chichijima Island encounter an address pattern they describe as unusual. While students address teachers using last name and honorific title, teachers call students by their first names only. Some of the teachers experience the indexical relationship between the exchanged forms as a nonreciprocal disjuncture, describing it as “too hierarchical;” others experience it as a reciprocal disjuncture, saying it creates a “too close” atmosphere in the school. Many who do not fall back on the culture-internal stereotype are teachers who struggle to maintain authority in the classroom. Here, these teachers’ “misreading” of the indexical meanings associated with the address forms invokes a trope of misunderstanding where a theoretical repair is summoned as a means to fix a problem. Silverstein’s model of indexical orders provides a means to understand the metapragmatic dissonance that characterizes teachers’ discourse.

Pindar’s epinikia challenge their original audiences to play the role of the “savvy interpreters” of these complex choral praise poems. Their interpretive skillfulness enables them to overcome obstacles purposively set by the poet. The ideal interpretation, an “entextualized” and overarching “metapragmatic interpretant,” is not static since these odes invite their hearers to vicariously travel alongside the deictically calibrated narrative ego and, equipped with insight drawn from interwoven exemplary myths and gnomic maxims, to insure that momentary praise for victors leads to their widespread if not immortal “glory” (kleos). The central argument of the article is that the odes develop an extended analogy between athletic prowess/victory and poetic excellence/performance that links the generation of kleos with the potential for recontextualized reperformances. This semiotically mediated “pragmatic” process is originally modelled by the poetic ego and then sequentially constructed and enacted/performed by savvy interpreters, including later readers.

This article takes interest in reocentric thinking, as well as in the ways such thinking is brought to bear on research on language and social life. Reocentric thinking, understood as referential theories that treat words as standing for things, is pervasive throughout the history of (Western) linguistic thought. Yet, its manifestations in descriptive linguistic research are scantly explored. Seeking to account for how a reocentric vision of language and social life is realized and concomitantly adapted in scholarly practice, the article analyses the research of Swedish linguist and folklorist Lars Levander (1883–1950). Levander spent most of his life documenting the vernacular languages and peasant life of Sweden’s Dalarna province. His assumptions about the relationship between words and things, as this article argues, significantly guided his research practice. Furthermore, they served to conceptualize, and concomitantly capture, certain configurations of time and vernacular authenticity. The article seeks, accordingly, to grasp the dialectic between Levander’s epistemic presuppositions and his scholarly production. More broadly, the article’s historical, epistemological mode of engagement exemplifies how early and potentially ingrained apprehensions of language, as well as their epistemic prerequisites and effects, can be understood and rectified.

This article examines the semiotics of labor through an analysis of a construction skill training program in Delhi. It focuses on recurring struggles between students and administrators over the nature and consequences of the activities they engaged in at the training center. Drawing on the notion of language ideology, it argues that students and administrators invoked different ideologies of labor in framing the value and meaning of productive activities. Under different ideological framings, productive action had the potential to transform the subject in radically different but equally unstable ways. While students worried that engaging in “labor work” could transform them into abject laborers, administrators tried to shore up the notion that “practical” would make students into successful workers. More generally, the paper suggests that attending to ideologies of labor can nuance accounts of how labor transforms subjects and social worlds.

The article examines how the participants of a six-week community theater project in Helsinki (2015–16) become socialized into the role of Artist by the professional leaders of the project. One of the main goals of the project was to explore the “joint voice” of the ethnically and socioeconomically diverse group and to make that voice heard in society. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article focuses on a central writing technique that was used to scan the participants’ past experiences and to rewrite them into ingredients of the joint voice. The article argues that the process of socialization involves a comprehensive epistemological transformation that gives rise to changes in the participants’ perception of their experiences. The epistemological structure that regulates the writing activities pertains both to principles of entextualization (i.e., how personal experiences become transformed into textual patterns) and to rules of interpersonal engagement (i.e., how others’ contributions are treated). Thus, it enables the construction of safe and effective channels along which private experiences can flow to the group’s collective discursive space and onward to the public.

Previous critical work on language ideologies surrounding English in postcolonial spaces has shown how perduring colonial logics are repurposed into contemporary discourses of value and class (Reyes 2017; Tupas 2019). This article builds on this work by examining a language-policing incident in an urban Pakistani café in which the owners link modernity, wealth, and professionalism to Western English competency. I further interrogate this interaction using a lens informed by organizational studies and decolonial work on structural whiteness to show how linguistic hegemonies working at the intersections of race, class, and organizational hierarchy in so-called postcolonial spaces can still embody and promote Anglocentric ideologies. Finally, in understanding how language policing works as a scalar act, this article ends with a discussion of how actors in positions of power can appeal to conflicting notions of scale to mask their larger ideologies as part of standard organizational practices, divorced from any larger context.

The practice of attaching inventive labels for things with a wide spectrum of selections to choose from is a widespread marketing practice. This article examines how unusual “fancy” color names are used in the South Korean cosmetics industry. Selecting and comparing the semiotic composition of color names of four companies operating within a single cosmetics corporation, this article reveals how fancy color term formations ideologically constructed in order to represent color function so as to lay the ground for social semiosis. Color terms in contemporary mediatized interactional settings work to mark and distinguish shades but, further, to provide basis for the characterization of commodities. What is shown is that commodity color terms for female cosmetics entail a scaling of femininity and that this scaling also relates a rescaling of those who can purchase such verbalizable colors.

In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.